Getting used to change is a bit like growing used to regularly being slapped around the face with last week’s unfinished to do lists, left out in the rain and still dripping when they hit your cheeks. Yes, there are worse things that can happen; yes, it sometimes brings the wake-up call you really need; but it is an experience to endure, not enjoy, when you are actually in the moment.
Change erupted within my household this week, catching us unprepared, bursting onto the scene in the shape of a red cassock, topped by a very self-satisfied grin. The Paleontologist is now officially a choir girl, and has been corraled immediately into a gaggle of rehearsals, services, and outings to Greggs. As her parents, we are of course delighted, and keep reminding each other of that as we search for the give in already stretched-to-bursting timetables that will allow us to officially transition from independent adults with some control of our lives into stereotypical glorified taxi drivers.
The Cowgirl is not delighted. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very proud of her sister, and very happy to announce her pride at the top of her voice in a crowded church. But she is also having the security that has always surrounded her shaken to its foundations, and she quite frankly Does Not Approve. Her sister is, in many ways, more of a constant than her parents: the one she conspires with after lights out; the one who held her hand in the long and lonely lunch breaks when she first started school; the one she worships as she treads the road less travelled, her footsteps, like King Wenceslas, breaking the terrors and harshness of winter and setting a clear path for her sister to follow. And now, sometimes, she’s not there. She’s singing when she used to be helping to imagine a zoo, an aeroplane, an exploration of the Antarctic; rehearsing when she used to fight for control of the remote control; absent when she should be walking into the swimmig pool and giving her sister courage by her mere presence. And so swimming lessons are avoided; TV choices change; shouting matches and clingyness both increase in equal measure.
As a parent, you know that one day, you will no longer be the centre of your child’s world. They will no longer believe you have all the answers, and they will be right. They will ask for your advice, and mock the answer you give them. Their hearts will break and kisses and cuddles will no longer fix anything at all. But when one of your children falls apart because the other is growing up very slightly faster than they are? All you can ever do is love them as hard as you can, and hope that will still be enough.
Two children in matching jumpers, carrying matching Lego, travellating together into the distance.
Five year old Cowgirls are not the only ones who don’t like it when their familiar realities shift under their feet. Those still fighting the transitioning reality of climate change are in the same position. Everything ahead of us is concealed in a haze of uncertainty and the disagreement of experts. Everything behind us is not only familiar, but also heavily weighted in the favour of those who most like to cry nonsense at the mere idea of climate change. Everything is about to come crashing down on our heads and their profit margins. And like a five year old, they are losing their tempers and overindulging in their freedom when they have it and spending a lot of time pretending they are not huddled on the sofa hoping this is all a bad dream.
Speaking truth with love is a phrase often used, and often misused. Sometimes it means “I’m going to explain everything that is wrong with you, but say it with a smile and terribly earnest eyes.” Sometimes it means “No offense, but…” Which is inevitably followed by a list that is likely to make you curl up into a ball and hide in a dusty corner until the middle of next summer. What it should mean can be just as difficult to face. It should be an honest reflection, a clear and unblemished mirror, held up without judgement or pain. But it is not speaking truth if you say only what your audience is already aware of, just as it isn’t loving if you say what they are utterly unprepared to hear, then leave them alone to deal with the consequences. Love is not an easy thing to feel, to offer, or to accept. But honestly offered and willingly accepted, it is a thing that can open minds and hearts and bank accounts, and is probably the only thing left that has a hope of saving the world.
A fence crowded with padlocks, looking out over a deep blue ocean.
“It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft time going.”
A week ago today, millions of people went out on the streets, chalking their hopes and furies onto walls; pavements; each other. It was one moment in an evolutionary story. It was a chance for weary prophets to draw in breath, feasting upon the energy and optimism of those not yet broken by the inertia of others who will not care. It may be a turning point; it may be another marker on a chaotic scattergram of things the youth of the 21st century choose to care about; it may be seen as mass hysteria if we discover that the dramatically changing climate is not, in fact, in any way affected by our presence on this world, and it is just humanity showing off its crazy-huge ego once again.
I couldn’t be part of that striking moment, which to me is an unexpected diamond in the string of plastic beads that thread together the realisation that doing something to reduce humanity’s negative impact on the world around us is a no-brainer. To make my contribution, I spent 7 days keeping track of the actions I take, trying to consider their greater impact. As any fluctuating participator in dietary fads and avoidance tactics such as myself will be able to tell you, nothing holds you to account quite like writing down what you are doing – both the positives and the wrappers you’d rather hide behind the back of the sofa. Even better, telling other people about it allows shared stories and mutual re-invigoration. So here’s what I’ve been doing, diesel-car driving and all. How about you? What’s your story?
Day 1: Saturday dawned bright, sunny, and a perfect start to a renewed way of looking at things. Full of enthusiasm and with a family day ahead of me, there were plenty of wins today. We went to the library (got to love a guilt-free book fest), hung the washing on the line to dry, put together a bag of clothes to donate to charity, watered the plants using water from the butt left behind by our predecessors (which obviously meant that it started raining about 15 minutes later). It was not a day without its downsides, though. These would become the features that, on good days, bad days and just a bit meh days, would form a constant muttering behind me, the monotonous burble of “actually, never mind the rest of it, are you ever going to do anything about us?” Overusing my lovely diesel car, moving slightly too fast, trying to combine tasks into single trips but consequently driving round and round and round and round, depressingly frequently in rush hour traffic jams full of everyone else in the same town also trying to fit errands and clubs and emergency shopping into the 15 minutes of unscheduled time they have squeezed in that week. Energy-boosting, energy-crashing, pre-packaged, plastic-wrapped snacks eaten when not hungry because it feels the only way to get from home time to bed time. Tumble-drying school uniforms and only checking the labels afterwards because frankly, even on good weeks I don’t have the energy for 15 rounds with The Cowgirl when I have the temerity to suggest that, in a lack-of-washing emergency situation, it might not be the end of the world if she wears a skirt instead of trousers.
Day 2 arrived and saw me waving the flag for multitasking vicars’ wives everywhere, as I represented the college I work for at a civic service in my husband’s church. (Getting TOIL for going to a service I was going to attend anyway, you say? That is what I call winning at life.) My positive actions for the day started with a rather lovely outfit, if I do say so myself, bought second hand and already worn by someone else from eBay, with accidentally matching shoes. Later, we looked at food as a family, and made a set of lolly sticks to try to balance the variety I need to keep some kind of sanity around cooking dinner with The Paleontologist’s need to be the boss of Everything In The World. They should also be a way of cutting down food waste, avoiding too much of today’s negative action: having to throw away a loaf of bread that had been sneakily lurking behind some gorgeous flowers gifted to us by a parishioner, and was now mouldy beyond salvation or freezing potential.
Other highlights of the week (by which I mean other actions playing on repeat because that is what life is like on the days I’m at work) included walking between different teaching sites and eating leftovers for lunch instead of taking trips to Aldi. They also included this week’s champion success story: taking my winter coat to have its zip changed. To put this into context, I sewed up the scuppered zip as a temporary fix the night before catching the train to Paris for our tenth wedding anniversary. My colleagues have been mocking me for the year and a half since then that I’ve spent struggling to get it on over my head. This gold-medal-winning moment happened as a result of seeking concrete actions to put in this post. The act of observing and recording genuinely did change my behaviour. Please don’t ever let OFSTED hear me say that.
Over the week, I tried harder with some things, and noticed my own hypocrisy with others. As a lifelong vegetarian who has been resisting giving up dairy with the passion many meaties show in the face of giving up bacon sandwiches, this is not an unfamiliar feeling. This is a process, for all of us. I’m not ready to give up my car yet, and neither is my local transport system. Reducing food waste, on the other hand – that is something we definitely can do. And let’s face it, with the utter unknown of Brexit just round the corner, wasting less food and working better with whatever we happen to have in the house might just become something we all need to go back to being better at. Chaotic uncertainty does have a way of making us appreciate what we used to have. Let’s just hope we all get there before we reach the point that no one will have anything any more.
This will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody: I am rather inept at saying no. Slightly more unusually maybe – or at least, slightly less talked about – is being equally bad at saying yes.
So how do you go through life saying neither no nor yes? By becoming a master of the unholy trinity: We’ll See, Maybe Later, and I’ll See What I Can Do. Used effectively, they will answer any situation known to humanity, and are as useful in a classroom as they are in any number of parenting conundrums. In fact, The Paleontologist has started predicting my response, and has changed her questioning technique, asking open questions whenever possible: “Why can’t we have bubblegum ice cream?” is a frequent opening gambit. Other favourites include “When are you going to let me have a phone?” and the wonderful “Why does our Tooth Fairy give less money than the Fairy that goes to [insert the name of absolutely any other classmate]?” The Cowgirl, predictably, approaches things totally differently, dodging asking questions altogether by doing things she thinks she won’t be allowed to do as secretly as possible. Thankfully, subtlety is not as much her forte as, say, running headlong through any obstacle, from rose bushes to recalcitrant authority figures. The time she ate a whole pack of chocolate coins, hiding the wrappers in her pillowcase so that I didn’t see them in the bin, showed particular insight and forward planning. At least, it did until she asked me to plump up her pillow the next evening. Oops.
So I have one child who has developed excellent open questioning techniques, and another who has mastered the art of independence before mastering her 3 times table. This is good, right? Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy noncommittal… Except, of course, we all know there is. And not just the kind of wrong that leads to my more decisive friends and relations (looking in no particular direction, but we both know who you are!) wanting to throw me out of the nearest window fifteen times on any given day. Avoiding both yes and no is a great way of dodging most forms of conflict: if no one (including me, particularly in busy times, or September, or first thing in the morning) knows what I want, they certainly can’t get in a grump if I disagree with them. But it has a deep darkness as a cost. It also means avoiding contentment within myself. Saying yes means saying this is good; saying I’m happy with this; saying this is enough.
There is often a feeling that living a more sustainable life means saying no. You say no to flying and take your chances on holidaying in the UK – may be amazing, may be the end of your marriage and feel like December. You say no to plastic and no to frappacinos, to deodorants bought in your lunch break because you forgot to put any on this morning, to sanitary towels, to the basic fundamentals of everyday living. You say no to meat, to cheese, to takeaways, to many of the things that make busy lives both enjoyable and achievable. You say no to all the things other people are doing, heart pounding as you say it – will they think you’re judging them? Are you judging them?
What if, instead of saying no, simple living was all about saying yes? It would change my perception of it dramatically if I could navigate that mindshift. Here’s an example of when I’ve tried. A few days ago, I went on a train journey to the very North of Scotland – and, as if 7 hours on a train (plus delays, of course) wasn’t enough, three days later we came back again. I was, obviously, not optimistic about the whole experience. Two children, one tablet, tired Mum, Dad away with work; what could possibly go right? But then came the magic. The first bit of magic was my previously-mentioned saintly mother saying yes to buying magazines for both children. Hooray for plastic toys! Hooray for Ninjago mini-figures! (That’s Lego, if you’re not up to speed with the latest lingo the kids are using.) Hooray for activities, and quizzes, and facts that keep science-crazy munchkins engaged for… well, actually for hours. We also had activity books, Top Trumps (cathedrals in one pack, dinosaurs in the other – only in my family…) and an ancient game of Master Mind that involves breaking a code set by the other player. And with that, we survived. We not only survived, we thrived. Both Mum and I managed to spend time reading; in fact, I stopped when I was ready, not before. I genuinely can’t remember when that last happened. It turns out that saying yes to what is directly in front of you, being present and answering questions, reading instructions, then letting the instructions be followed without interference (even when they Do It Wrong), works terribly well, something I used to know, but had let myself forget.
The beauty of the Scottish coastline. The wonder of a happy child who hasn’t run anywhere for several hours.
Sometimes, I say we’ll see because I don’t know how to even conceive of having the energy to do what is asked (particularly when I’m being asked to build a working robot out of toilet roll wrappers, to take just one example…) And at other times, I say we’ll see because I mean no. Just no. In fact, I frequently mean I’d rather do the school run across hot coals than even think about doing what is asked. (Building a robot isn’t that bad. A whole afternoon of joining in with watching Peppa Pig is.) So I’m setting myself a slightly late #ChallengeAugust. To say no when I mean it; to say yes when I want it; to say we’ll see when I genuinely mean I don’t know yet whether it’s yes or no. Well, apart from when discussing birthday parties. With four months to go until the closest one, any resolution needs a touch of realism and some hard-won messy survival techniques, naturally.
The rail bridge approaching Dundee. An utterly stunning sweep of countryside.
A lifetime ago, when staying up all night was something I did for fun (or essay deadlines), and TV marathons had to be planned in advance, I used to serve on committees. A lot. In fact, I never really felt part of a group unless I was wearing at least two hats within it; I’ve always enjoyed knowing how things work, what needs to happen behind the scenes. It’s probably why I enjoy being a treasurer. There’s nothing like it for finding out all the gossip how everything fits together.
Then I had a baby. A few years later, I had another. And the first baby was now a mobile, bloody-minded force of nature in her own right. And everything changed. That was the point that I felt I had to give everything up, unable to commit to anything for fear I wouldn’t be able to see it through.
So it is quite a big deal for me to feel ready to do something for my Quaker Meeting once again. The advantage of being closer to a Crone than a Maiden is that I have slowly started to develop a modicum of common sense – something that does not come naturally to me. Start small, I said to myself. And do you know what? I actually followed my own advice, limiting myself to signing up to do teas and coffees after Meeting. Just for one week. It doesn’t get smaller than that – well, unless your Meeting has a deputy plant waterer, anyway. (Yes, that apparently can be a thing. I’m not the only one who sometimes runs low on common sense…)
Sunday was the big day. So, inevitably, on Sunday I slept through my alarm and set in train a chain reaction that I would love to say was unusual, but is actually the definition of “lazy like Sunday morning” in my household. I woke up an hour late, scrabbling out of bed before my eyes were fully open, holding my breathe for screaming from the girls’ room, worrying more when instead there was absolute silence. As I got out of the shower, The Cowgirl came to find me. It had all been The Paleontologist’s idea, she assured me, which is never a good start. They had decided to eat all the sweets from a birthday party goody bag. With big, mournful eyes, she explained how hungry they had been, waiting for me to come and get breakfast for them. And now her tummy hurt and she was going back to bed. So now I’m angry with them (not for eating the sweets – who can blame them, when they were sitting on the kitchen table; more for not stopping before they got ill and not getting cereal, which they’re quite capable of doing when they want to). I’m even more angry with myself for not being downstairs when I should have been.
The Paleontologist assures me she will eat porridge if I make it. That’s ok, I think. It’s healthy, I think. We can even add a portion of fruit to it, I think. Will I never learn? She starts to eat, at about the speed of that fight scene in the Matrix. You can almost see the trail of the spoon as it inches its way to her mouth, her body bending away at the same time as mouth and spoon somehow never quite make contact. So now I’m hanging on to my shouty voice by a thread, desperately trying to reason with them and explain why I would appreciate them moving slightly faster. Pleeeease. I just about hold it together until The Paleontologist, one sock waving vaguely around her head, started talking to me about what we might need to buy for our holiday. The one in two months time. When we needed to leave the house five minutes ago. So now I’m using the growl that bypasses my throat and comes straight from my chest, and both children are looking at me like I’ve grown a tail and finally, finally, they start to move, but only because now, they are worried too.
We finally make it into the car, remembering the milk, which almost certainly qualifies as a miracle. Once we are most of the way into town, the red haze fades enough from my ears that I start listening to what The Cowgirl is chattering about. “And there’s another one. I’ve got one, two, three on my tummy, and two on my legs.” “Have you counted the one on your chin?” pipes up The Paleontologist.
They’re counting spots. Of course they are. The spots they’ve both noticed, which, in my hurry, frustration, anger, I had completely missed. So now I’m sitting in a car with a five year old counting spots, remembering the message about chicken pox that came through from school, playing through my mind could it be? Would it be? Would it be worse to take a child with potential chicken pox to a Quaker Meeting, or to leave them with no milk for their After Meeting Drinks? (I decided to go to Meeting. You should never ask people to live without tea. In the end, it was chicken pox, but not the kind that slows a cannonball down. At least I am now much clearer about what chickenpox looks like when it’s not just on Google…)
Anger. It controlled me that morning, blocking my experience of the world around me and every moment I walked through to get to the point that I would not let anyone down. Anger. It stands, seemingly indestructable, a barrier between me and life. Between life and joy. Between joy and peace. Anger. That feeling of frustration, gnawing at my belly, gnashing my jaw, scrunching my spine. It is an everyday thing for me, a whirlpool that sucks everything within itself, driving towards oblivion until all that is left is tension, radiating through my bones and stopping me seeing beyond the moment.
Image of a fireball exploding from a volcano, seen through burnt trees. Image by geralt, from Pixabay.
But this isn’t solely anger. Bleeding into it, blended together until they are a new and augmented all-consuming fug, is fear. So much of being a parent is about fear. Sometimes I feel that living in modern times at all is the most terrifying thing, but being responsible for others gives that terror pinpoint focus. My grandparents lived through the Blitz and the Great Depression; my parents, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, the Thatcher years. In my time I cannot point to a moment in history which will be remembered with the same capital letters; and yet I also can’t point to a time in recent years when I have not been afraid. Fear for my children and fear for the world and anger that any of us should be put in this position merge together. Trying to be body positive to two girls with entirely opposing builds feeds my fear of how children are being taught to see themselves from the outside in, with the perfect photo being the hallmark of success. The Paleontologist telling me, only half in jest, that she is already worrying about her end of primary school exams (in several years time)? That makes me furious with the education system as we know it, and scared for the pressure she will put herself under when the time comes. They are ill and I plan for hospital; they are teased and I fear for their mental health. They tell me what they want to be when they grow up, and I get scared and try to hide it, wondering if either paleontology or caring for animals will even be an option in twenty, thirty, forty years. Then I get angry with the people saying it won’t be; surely no one in such a progressive, capable world will really let things get to that point? But stopping it means taking a hit ourselves for people who are not us; who may not live in this country; who are not even alive yet. And taking a hit for anyone else is not something our society does well. So then I get more scared, and more angry, and the haze builds up around me.
Life is tough, and made tougher through the pressures of society to balance everything in the world. None of us are good enough unless we are working full time with a full-time commitment to our children. We must be creative whilst doggedly seeing through all our commitments. We must be committed to every good cause going, whilst single-mindedly pursuing one goal. We must look perfect whilst paying no heed to our appearance. We must be warriors, nurturers, educators, pastors, volunteers and generals. Once upon a time, this was solely the domain of women. By demonstrating that was not fair, we have somehow set up a system we call more enlightened: rather than treating women more gently, instead we hold men to the same impossible standards.
At work, I have been called an oasis of calm (yes, I laughed too the first time someone said it to me, but isn’t it lovely!) But calm cannot be recognised without storms, just as silence is only apparent after noise. Somewhere within me is that oasis, waiting to be discovered. Maybe it can only be found by walking into the storm.
What does walking into that chaos look like? It simmers below the surface, lava waiting to get to boiling point before exploding out into an atmosphere where it is lethal and destructive. It is strong. So very strong. Can it be harnessed? Can it be used for good, for transformation, for evolution? If all the anger, the fear, the turbulance and hate felt within the core of our communities could be harnessed, what would it not be possible to achieve? If righteous anger guides our actions, there are no monoliths, however immutable they may seem, that would stand before us all acting as one.
Text: If anyone ever asks you “What would Jesus do?”, remind him that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities. So true! It’s the linking it to righteous anger that gets me at times, though…
Many years ago, in a marquee somewhere in the South of England, I listened to Jocelyn Bell speaking about her work, and the magic of the universe. At the time, I had no real idea what an astonishing woman she is, and how lucky we were to have her speaking to our Quaker community. Now, I love that she is a hero of The Paleontologist’s, and magic in her own right as she lives her faith through her work.
After she spoke, she joined us in worship. I remember others sharing feelings of awe and insecurity in the face of the vastness of the universe, and I certainly felt that too. For me, though, that feeling was tempered by another that was somehow both complementary and, simultaneously, in direct opposition. It was not a recognition of overwhelming stellar entities, but rather of the incredible nature of the minute particles that group together to make them. Those particles that also make us, and everything else around us. We are eternally interlinked with mosquitos, with mountain ranges, with far-flung galaxies, and we are all unable to be anything at all unless all those miniscule dust specks work together in harmony.*
Over the years, I have been part of a lot of rants discussions about leadership, particularly in politics. I’m not going to lie, a lot of them have involved Jeremy Corbyn, and whether he has an effective leadership style. I know he has been slated in the press for being a weak leader, but as someone who thinks very little of command and control leadership, I tend to think that kind of slating is a good thing. In my not-even-slightly-humble opinion, the idea of imposing your own will on your followers is not leadership at all, it is dictatorship, and there are very few situations where it is ever going to bring out the best in a situation.
Good leadership to me might be better described as leadership by consent. A real leader – let’s call him Jed – is someone who is respected by his team, who collectively understand the direction they are travelling in. He encourages everyone to have a voice, before pulling together the best ideas, accepting he may not have got it right first time, and putting together a plan that everyone has faith in. Jed looks for the best in everyone, whether they have put themselves forward or not, and gives them opportunities to grow in themselves and try out new ideas, giving more and more people the skills and experiences vital to being able to lead well.
As I said, I had hoped Jeremy Corbyn might end up being a leader like this, which would certainly have been a breath of fresh air in the smog of British politics, then and now, as well as advertising on a huge stage that there are other ways of doing leadership, especially somewhere like Westminster. I hoped for a politician who could set aside ideas of personal grandeur and old allegiances and find ways of building consensus among those who, ultimately, are all there to serve their country and their constituents. Jeremy Corbyn has done some wonderful things, before and after his unexpected rise to prominence, but pulling people together to form a collective movement for positive change is sadly not something he can claim to have achieved.
Daily life in my household is universally frazzled, as I may have just hinted at before. The school run is consistently accompanied by a discordant symphony of shrieks, dinosaur roars and grumbles, and is always done in the car, so that we can scootch off after generously donating our chaos-makers to their breakfast club, and still get to work in time to not be horrifically late; or scoop them up, yawns, chatterings and all, with just enough time for tea and bed. This afternoon was rather beautifully different. It was a glorious day, so I decided to do the utterly unthinkable, leave work a little early (and the sky didn’t fall on my head. Miracle!) and walk round to pick the children up from school. Double bonus, I got to stop off and vote on my way, and even had time for a chat with the Guardians of the Big Black Box.
On our way home, staggering behind my super speedy offspring, laden down with bookbags, violin and PE kit (there is always some truth at the bottom of every stereotype) as they scooted away with quicksilver grace, I watched them repeatedly stop, bend over, shake their heads, move on. We got to the traffic lights and I got close enough to hear The Cowgirl muttering to herself at one of these stops, bent double with a squashed plastic water bottle in her hand. “I need to talk to all my class about this. We need to do a litter pick At Once. We need to all Work Together or it will get Worse and Worse.” (I promise, you really can hear the capital letters as she speaks.) Her face was scrunched with concentration, and determination and anger radiated from her in equal measure.
What a difference there would be if that was the reaction we all had in similar situations. This is bad leads to something must be done often enough. But she went so much further than that. She went on to I must do something about this, and then, even better, and I must ask other people to help me.
A lifetime ago, in a marquee in the middle of a field, I first realised the beauty and power of an infinite number of interlinking particles working together in a harmonious single unit. Walking home from school, The Cowgirl demonstrated that she has learned the same lesson, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t go along with it. Maybe it is time for us all to find a new kind of leader. She is unlikely to be someone who speaks loudest. She may not be someone who speaks at all. But she will understand that this world only works when we all act together, and she will live her life in the knowledge that we are all made with stardust.
*Yes, I know. My science is a little shaky, but I’m going for a metaphor here, people…
Rocks form an arch framing a silhouette. The sky is crowded with stars. Image by skeeze, on Pixabay.
Can anything really be freely chosen if it is introduced to you at gunpoint?
Quakers have a series of Advices and Queries. They are phrased very gently, whilst pointing out in no uncertain terms that it is probably worth re-evaluating at least some of the fundamental principles by which you have chosen to live your life. If books could speak, they would be heaving a heavy sigh and murmuring “I’m not angry, just disappointed…”
Part of Advice number 41 says this:
Try to live simply. A simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength. Do not be persuaded into buying what you do not need or cannot afford.
Weaving into my mind like bindweed – beautiful, clingy and impossible to get rid of – is this question: Is it actually possible to freely choose a simple lifestyle?
It is possible to live a simple lifestyle in order to reduce your personal impact on the environment. But if you are compelled by the driving terror of global catastrophe, is that really a free choice?
You can do it as a way of living within your means, on a limited budget. But when I think about that, I think about counting coppers out of a jar to buy bread, and borrowing from friends to be able to call the bank and find out why I had no access to any money at all. I am very lucky, and have only been that desperate once. It might have been living simply, but it was not even close to a choice.
You can stand as counter-cultural, deliberately rejecting what is seen as of most value to the modern British mindset; refusing to buy into societal norms, rejecting capitalism with acts of rebellion. But if you define yourself by what you don’t participate in, can that be either a free and personal choice, or a source of strength?
Maybe the real question is what am I thinking when I talk about a simple life? Whenever I think about it, I mostly think about how my life is the complete opposite of simplicity. I think about the chaos of everyday routine, pushing the whole family out of the door Every Single Day before any of us really wants to even be out of bed (except The Paleontologist, that is. It seems that being willing to get out of bed as early as possible is another of those things that skips a generation. It missed her father out by a country mile and landed straight on her. Unfortunately, she inherited the full measure from her Grandad, leaving none at all for her sister.) I think about balancing homework, cooking, phonics, play time and downtime in the witching hour between getting home from After-school Club and sitting down to eat. I think about the school holiday we have just had, balancing church commitments, family time, lesson planning and jobs that never get done in term time, leaving us all more tired at the end than we were at the beginning (and with the washing baskets just as full. How is that even a physical possibility?)
Given all this, I am clearly the perfect person to talk about freely choosing a simple life… I often say, when justifying being a family with two cars, that it is necessary for us to have two cars in order to meet all our obligations. What I actually mean is that we need two cars in order to live the life we have chosen. Could we both get to work without them? No, not with the public transport we have here. Could we move closer to the area we both work in? No, not when the Church chooses where we live. Could we form local connections to help pick up our children so that we can lift share more? Um, yes, but I may have already mentioned that I’d rather chew my own arm off than ask for favours I might not be able to repay. Could we change our work patterns to avoid the necessity of two cars? Yes; but only by one of us leaving a vocation we have both sacrificed a lot to pursue. And we just don’t want to do that.
Given the fact that so many people live lives balanced between chaos and breaking point, how can we picture what a simple lifestyle would even look like?
The need to be better – better than Them, better than ourselves last year, better than our wildest imaginings – drives many of us to never just be. We must always be doing something, because we must always prove, to ourselves and the world, that this is the best moment ever. It is drummed into us from the days of Paw Patrol onwards that that is what is required for a day to be worth living, or recording, or remembering. It is, of course, an entirely unachievable ambition, though the pursuit of it can lead to beautiful moments, as well as the inevitable meltdowns that come when, for instance, this year’s Easter Egg Hunt was not quite up to last year’s standard…
The only way that a simple lifestyle as an achievable desire makes sense to me is to think about what I want to be choosing, not what I would be avoiding. Choose community. Choose fun. Choose habits that lead to satisfaction with yourself and those around you. Choose to be happy with what you have and not compare it to other people’s Instagram lives. Choose local food and playing in the garden. Choose giving away things you still like to others who can’t afford them.* Choose to think in a whole new way, that looks at what is there to enjoy not what is not there to envy. Choose to learn from others’ acts of love and generosity, not sulk that their house is bigger (or cleaner…) than mine. That’s the simple lifestyle I am looking for. And it is only achievable through determined choices, day by day, year by year, one picture, one blog post, one memory at a time.
*For those of you who are my generation, and now can’t get a Scottish voice saying “I chose not to choose life. I chose something else” out of your heads, yes, it was deliberate #sorrynotsorry
A stunning autumn day; The Cowgirl, just learning to run, heads off into the distance.
Scooters. Phones. Toothpaste. Glasses. Roller skates. Fridges. Ankle Foot Orthoses (mobility aids, usually known as AFOs – so inevitably, my family only ever use the term UFO. In fact, I just had to Google the proper name…) Bicycles. Hearing aids. Cars. Lego (said in a growly, so-excited-the-hyper-just-screams-through kind of voice. The only way to say it properly; trust me.) Plastic is everywhere. It makes everyday life more accessible. It is a key ingredient in making modern living as (relatively) cheap as it is. It is used to make a marvellous mosaic of machines and games that have no purpose other than to just be fun. The Paleontologist, in particular, would not want to live in a world where 280-step Lego rollercoasters were not in existence. Of course, she would probably have picked up far less swear words too, but nobody’s perfect…
I give you Lego Jurassic World. With a snow mobile in the background, because frankly, why not? This is normal decoration for a dining room, right?
But plastic is the villain in every good story about the oceans, city parks, farms, even Mount Everest. Bags that sea creatures mistake for tasty jellyfish nibbles, or nappies that will still be around a hundred years after their wearers have themselves grown old and died, or teabags, for goodness sake – is nothing sacred? We have all been part of the creation of a culture of throwaway values, of putting convenience before worth.
I have been trying to cut down on plastic – particularly single use plastic. I have, of course, put as much plastic into the kerbside recycling as possible for some years (increasing dramatically when I realised I could rinse it out in the dishwasher instead of doing it by hand 😳) Recently, I have increased my efforts: toilet roll now magically appears on our doorstep, wrapped in paper and made from bamboo; milk arrives in glass bottles; and it turns out it is possible to get through a period without plastic. Well, except the ibuprofen boxes and chocolate wrappers. Oops…
The problem is that cutting down on plastic does not just mean saying no to throw away Costa cups and regifting Enchantimals. (No, I hadn’t heard of them either, until The Cowgirl got given some for her last birthday. Half skunk, half girl, and a build so skinny they make Barbie look rotund. So of course, the children love them.) Cutting down on plastic really means cutting down on the things that make it possible to work, have fun, have kids, have a hobby, all at the same time. It means forward planning, and being willing to go to different shops for different things, rather than just doing a Morrisons shop online and accepting that peppers and aubergines will arrive in polythene netting encased in shrinkwrap. It means aiming for a picnic bag that puts Mary Poppins to shame, filled with metal straws, collapsible cups, cloth handkerchiefs and bamboo cutlery. It means having the disposable income to invest in reusable options, and the disposable time to put in the groundwork, find the alternatives, make cleaning products at home, grow your own food.
As real life kicks in the questions get harder. Should I avoid plastic altogether, buying new non-plastic storage containers, or is it better to keep using old ice cream pots and takeaway tubs, which at least mean they are getting more use than they were intended for? How about going to a plastic free shop? Should I go there to do my shopping, even if I have to drive miles and end up wasting a huge amount of time and fuel? I always intend to buy vegetables without packaging, but then I have a week of mocks to mark and end up buying ready-cut vegetables in even more plastic than usual. Can you get medicines without plastic; and even if you can, should you? Children make their way round zoos and aquariums, entranced by the occupants and engaging with fantastic interactive displays educating them about the impacts of plastic waste on the environment; then they stock up on Haribo and Fruit Shoots for the drive home.
A few weeks ago, I helped my mother clear out her loft. Buried near the back, under 30+ years of slate dust, were a few bags of the toys my brother and I had outgrown a lifetime ago. We put them onto Olio, and after the usual confusion of not quite managing arranged pick-ups, they were passed on to someone intending to share them between her son and his nursery. When she saw them, her response was “They’re gorgeous. Almost too good to be played with.”
Almost too good to be played with? Toys that were second-hand 35 years ago and have been abandoned for years in a way that fills me with guilt (Toy Story has a lot to answer for) are still remarkable for their quality? What have we done? We all, as consumers, have a part in this. We have accepted as the status quo toys that become worn after 6 months – but that’s ok, because after that they will have been forgotten anyway, and something else will be in favour. Our phones last 18 months if we’re lucky, but that’s great, because the blistering pace of progress means we’re already eager for faster processing and better cameras after half that time. With a daughter so keen on excavations, I can’t help wondering: if there is still humanity on this planet in 500 years time, what will they find if they excavate a 21st century dwelling? What of our lives would be on display in museums of the future; and is that the picture we want them to form about us? It is a baffling contradiction that the things we consume break so easily, yet are made from materials that take centuries to degrade.
I don’t know how to fix this. I think it’s time to start making these links out loud, and talking about them more. It’s time to get back to looking for a form of protein The Paleontologist enjoys that doesn’t come wrapped in single-use, non-recyclable plastic. It’s time to acknowledge the power and responsibility we all have in these things, and use that power wisely and collectively. And after that? I think it might be time to sit down with my super-smart children, over a snack that doesn’t come double-wrapped in plastic, and work out together how we can possibly make this a better world to live in.
At every point in my life, I have thought to myself that this is it. I am more busy than I have ever been before, and I have reached capacity. I thought it when I was doing my GCSEs (oh, the irony!) I thought it when I was doing my A levels and learning to drive and working, all at the same time. (You know, just writing that made me realise why it is so frustrating when my students complain about balancing those 3 things. Should I have more sympathy, or should I tell them they ain’t seen nothing yet? Choices, choices…) I thought it at University, then again when I was working a few different jobs at once straight after Uni. I thought it when I was working full time and volunteering as a Quaker treasurer. I thought it when I was at home with one child, and then with two. I thought it when I was training to be a teacher. Now, as a full time teacher with still fairly young children, I know it’s true. I really have reached capacity. Never, ever let me take anything else on. Ever. Well, unless something better comes along, obviously. Or something really fun. Or something really worthwhile… And there I go, doing it all again.
Looking back on those earlier times in life, the thing I miss more than anything else is the time to stop, and read, and think. Even in the very early days of motherhood, I remember reading – book in one arm, feeding child in the other, making plans. Of course, I had no idea what was coming, so most of my planning was thrown out over the next six months, but what a glorious luxury that time was, and how little I realised it then.
Time is not something anyone seems to have any more. I recently realised that I have no actual physical parenting books at all, now that even The Cowgirl has officially outgrown Penelope Leach. (On a side note, any recommendations of good books about parenting pre teens would be really appreciated. I can buy them and feel guilty every time I see them unread on my bedside table…) Instead of having time to plan, I go with whatever works – usually whatever leads to a marginally easier life. And once I’ve found the sweet spot of something that gets the job done, I would rather chew off my own arm than change it. Bedtime is one example of that in our household. We still have exactly the same bedtime routine that we set up when The Cowgirl was six months old, at the same time in the evening, because you know what, it works, the girls sleep through, and we have some time in the evenings to do marking, catch up on emails, or, you know, watch The West Wing from start to finish. Again.
It’s ok, I reassure myself. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s working well, so let’s not tamper with it. The problem with this, of course, is that the world is changing all the time, and children tend to change five times faster than the rest of the world. As they change, our expectations and responses as parents need to change too. And if we’re going to do this well, they need to change preemptively. By the time you notice that an old favourite isn’t working any more, in my case at least, it’s usually not been working for quite some time, and I’m running to catch up lost ground.
When The Paleontologist was young, her desperate cry when upset was that she wanted a Mummy hug on the sofa. It was a beautifully simplistic time (except for the time when she refused to walk home because she was cold, wet, and wanted a hug on the sofa. It took me half an hour of persuasion, swearing and tears – all from me, obviously – before she agreed to start walking home so that we could actually sit on the aforementioned sofa to have said hug…) Could I use the same comfort now? Well, the hug and the location remain the same, but they have lost some of their magic. They are no longer enough to cure any ill, and instead of being all perfect, the hug is for comfort, not solutions, and the talking, and the crying, and the questions, and the not-having-answers-but-that-has-to-be-OK is where the magic is slowly, so slowly, being brewed. My ways of dealing with childhood devastations have been forced to shift and shudder and get through on a wing and a prayer in a desperate attempt to keep up with growing minds and developing bodies.
Almost every day seems taut with new decisions: tiny individually, but when matted together they become a hedge of thorns that it is almost impossible to get through without getting scratched to shreds. Do we let them open the door without an adult? (Answer: no – remember we live in a vicarage and so you never quite know who will be on the other side of the door, and in what state.) Do we let them check to see if the milk has been delivered? (Answer: yes, but never again – by the time we came downstairs, they had not only got the milk in, they had also drunk the lot of it…) How much freedom do we give them online? How much do we nag The Paleontologist to do her homework, and how much do we let her suffer the consequences of leaving it undone? Do we let her read as late as she wants to (just like her mother…) even if it means that she’s an absolute misery in the morning, because she didn’t get enough sleep (just like her mother…)? I let The Cowgirl choose for herself who to invite to her birthday party, rather than inviting the entire year, and my goodness me, the horror on some people’s faces when I mention this is frankly terrifying.
Looking at the world around us, and our relationship with it, I can see a number of parallels. It’s not broken yet – though the continuing devastation caused by Cyclone Idai tell us that it’s not exactly unbroken either. We don’t want to mess with what works. Our lives and our communities are doing just about alright using the methods and priorities we have set up over a number of generations, and frankly, we just don’t have the time to stop and work out alternatives. Particularly alternatives that will probably not be as convenient. It means letting go of something very dear to us, something that has seen us through some really tough times. It means letting go of the things that made us feel like we are in control and we have this, and moving into the unknown, where we might not be in control any more, and we certainly don’t have this, and accepting that we may never have it again. Why on earth would we do that voluntarily?
But we know the answer to that. Nothing lasts forever, and desperately clinging on to it with both hands still doesn’t stop time passing. Everything changes. The world might not change quite as quickly as our children do, but it still moves faster than we would like. We need to change our relationship with our children preemptively, before we destroy it by trying to keep it static; we need to change our relationship with the world just as much, or we won’t only kill our relationship with our environment, we will kill the environment itself.
Of course, with both parenting and, you know, saving the world, recognising you need to change the approach is only the first step. The even greater challenge is working out what to do next…
A canal in spring, the towpath fading into early morning mist, concealing the way ahead and the familiar landscape around.
Be yourself, they said. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks of you, they said. Follow your dreams, and be what you want to be, they said.
What a mantra to live by. The only problem is, it rather assumes that the thing you want to be is a good thing. In my case, the thing I want to be is perfect. I want all the people around me to be happy, and healthy, and doing things they love. They can even be rich or materialistic if they really have to be. But I want me to be perfect. Perfect in body size – hardly original; perfect at work – outstanding, I think they call it in the trade; perfect as a mother – (hides behind a computer screen rather than going to a primary school violin concert, so that’s a fail); perfect as a vicar’s wife – the kind who serves gin and always knows how to solve other people’s problems, whilst simultaneously fixing the photocopier and booking a donkey for Palm Sunday. All round perfect. So when someone says to me “Be what you want to be,” I hear “You must be perfect. And if you’re not perfect, really, pack up and go home.”
And, quite often, that is exactly what I do. Looking at all the options, I know that I can’t do everything, and the fear of not being perfect stops me from doing anything at all. How is it possible to do the right thing in a world full of endless choices and conflicting needs? I want my children to grow up in a world that is not hurtling towards self-destruction with only an air bag as an emergency break, so I know I should drive my own car less. But I also want my kids to be able to do normal things, like going to the cinema or trampolining with friends. And I know that I don’t have the energy to get them there on the bus – and, more importantly, get them back again on the bus, rather than throwing them under it when they’re exhausted and I’ve run out of food to bribe them with. So I start tearing myself up about what is the right thing to do, and is it selfish to put my children’s needs first, and am I using them as an excuse to put my own needs first, and is that selfish, and before I know it, I’ve turned into Chidi from The Good Place, and I’m about to be crushed by an air conditioning unit filled with my own indecision and self-doubt.*
Or what about what clothes to wear. It’s amazing how many implications just that simple decision can have. I want to wear clothes that make me feel good about myself – luxurious and in control. (Yes, I know that clothes aren’t everything – but I also know the magic of the right pair of shoes.) So, I want to wear clothes that make me feel zingy. But, at the moment, I can’t. All my clothes are just too tight. So now, I have a decision to make. I could go on a diet. There are a few out there that I haven’t tried, and I’m sure they would work if I followed them closely enough. But let’s face it: I know how to eat healthily. I’ve done it plenty of times before, and I’m not doing it now. For today, my priority is keeping going, and sod the amount of chocolate bars it takes me to do it. I don’t want to go on a diet – and that decision makes me feel like a failure, because how can I be perfect if I’m doing something that makes me feel bad and not want to do anything about it? Alternatively, I could buy a whole new wardrobe. I know that would be tempting for a lot of people, but you know what, it’s not for me. It would be utterly unsustainable, as it would have to be fast fashion for me to have any hope of affording enough clothes to wear regularly. Also, I really like a lot of my clothes, and I’m not ready to give up on wearing them again. This would make me feel like a failure, because I’m not perfect at sustainability. Finally, I could keep going with what I have. Which is, of course, the default, and therefore what I’ll probably end up doing. But it’s uncomfortable. And it makes me sad, because these clothes used to make me feel zingy, and they don’t any more. And you know what – that just makes me feel like a failure, without even knowing what I’m not being perfect at.
These concerns are small, and self-contained, and a little bit hyperbolic. They are also fundamental to how we see ourselves and our own struggles. Do we look to the impact on the world, and put it over ourselves? Do we look at how others see us as the most important thing? Do we think about how something will make us feel – will it make me happy? Is being happy the ultimate goal?
Pebbles dropped into ponds cause beautiful ripples that flitter and fade. I don’t want to be a pebble, though. I want to be a rock, that, when dropped into the pond, will never be forgotten – that doesn’t leave ripples, but changes the whole landscape. I want to be noticed. I think we all do. And if I can’t be that rock, well, what’s the point of doing anything at all? But bubbles and ripples bring more joy than rocks. They mean life-giving rain, causing ripples and dimples and flowers to grow. They mean skipping stones and taking time to stop, and breathe, and enjoy. If you’re very lucky, they even mean otters, streaming up and down, hidden, half-seen, heard in the rustling of the reeds before they race away, leaving you wondering if you saw anything at all.
We don’t all have the energy to find exciting new sustainable ways of doing things. We don’t all have the strength to keep going through the fear of failure. We don’t all have the privilege of the financial security to lead slow lives, or the family support to do that. What can we do? If we just do what’s easy, we’re ducking out of one of the biggest decisions of our lives. But it’s a decision that we must all make for ourselves.
Be yourself, I say. Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks of you, I say. Have the courage of your convictions, and lead the life you are called to lead, I say. But for goodness sake, don’t think it’s easy working out what that is. Have the courage to accept that for a while, you’re just going to have to wander in the wilderness, dodging perfect whenever you can. After a while, your hard work will pay off. You’ll find your way, and you’ll become wonderfully good enough.
Otter swimming, sending ripples out ahead of her. Image by strichpunkt from Pixabay
*If you haven’t seen The Good Place, and you have Netflix, I recommend it. Both very funny and full of all the best and the worst of moral philosophy – what more could you ask for?
A couple of weeks ago, I got a flat tyre. It turns out that ignoring the warning light because you know something needs doing, and you’ll do it when you get a moment thank you very much, means that sometimes, you end up in exactly the situation the beeping light is meant to avoid. Oops. Now I’m not great with cars, but I can just about use the air machine. I even worked out for myself how to use the flat tyre button, and so was a bit peeved when a random guy came over and terribly helpfully offered totally unsolicited advice. It was 5:30pm, I was tired, and he was patronising, so I may have been a little sarky in my response. The assumption that I needed help just grated, and brought out my inner pre-schooler, insisting on doing it by myself, and probably making the whole job take three times as long as a result.
As it turned out, the tyre was well beyond being fixed by blowing air into it, and I ended up going back to the guy (who was genuinely nice, as well as volunteering for the Air Ambulance). He and his colleague not only agreed (with some surprise) that I had been using the machine right, but also identified the problem with the tyre. They then changed the wheel for me, which is definitely beyond any knowledge I may have had about my own car. I was half way through explaining I didn’t think we had a jack in the back when they slid off a hidden panel and there it was. Good thing there wasn’t anything else hidden in there, really.
Standing at the side of the petrol station, watching two strangers go through the boot of my car, I had another decision to make. The children needed to be picked up ASAP. I could phone our neighbour, who is lovely, and gave me her number at Christmas with the assurance that I should call if I ever needed help picking up the girls from school. Or, I could call my husband, who was busy, stressed, and half an hour away.
I called my husband. Of course. Why? Because it was easier, and I was tired. Because I utterly loathe making phone calls, and making a phone call to someone I don’t know particularly well, in order to ask for a favour, is about the worst kind of phone call I can imagine. Because I didn’t want to look like I wasn’t coping, or was needy. Because she might say no, and I would have gone through all of that for nothing.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that asking for help is not one of my strengths. To be fair, very few of us are any good at it – we all seem to ask for too much help, or, more commonly, none at all. However, this was not just yet another incident of me refusing to accept that I might need help. It was also a case of the offer being made in that fabulously non-commital way: just give me a shout if you ever need help. It’s up there, in my experience, with “just ask if you need a babysitter”, or “if you’re feeling down, just talk to someone”. The times that you really need help are also the times you are lying on the floor in a puddle, hands over your mouth to hold in the panic, and you are damned if you are going to admit that you are not coping with things that everyone else manages with ease. Right now, that tiny dreg of pride is the only thing keeping you from melting into the floor, and you are not letting go of that too.
When The Paleontologist was old enough for me to be desperate for a grown-up night out to not need me around for milk at a moment’s notice, we discovered how hard it is to find babysitters in a new town. We had plenty of people offering help: “just pick up the phone, dear.” I loved that community, but the only time we ever accepted an offer of a babysitter was when someone did not leave the action to me. Instead, she took out her diary, picked up a pen, and said “When shall I come over?” This taught me a lesson I try to replicate, though I often fall short. It is not just that we are really bad at asking for help; we are also, generally, really bad at offering it in a way that lets people say yes.
This affects parenting, making it much harder to form the villages we all need to raise our children well and maintain our sanity at the same time. It affects mental health, leaving the onus on the people who are crumbling, instead of expecting more of those who – at the moment, at least – are more steady on their feet. But it also affects things that are bigger than our individual lives. One of these is our attitude to climate action, and as such, it is something we all need to change.
We all have our own reasons for not wanting to take help. We have our own reasons for not wanting to impose our help on others, too, and most of them are either noble and genuine or so deeply ingrained into the British psyche that it would take the end of the world to get over them. The problem is that all these things make us islands, fighting to survive, standing on our own. Some of us have very small islands – some of us live on them entirely alone. Some of us live there with our families, or close friends. Sometimes they include work colleagues, or your church, or other people who think the same way as you about the things that are important. But all of our islands stop us being genuinely connected to this beautiful shared tear-drop of a planet. They stop us reaching out to help people on our street, forming relationships that will help us work together to reduce our consumption or improve our local communities. They stop us seeing the the world around us as something that we all equally share, and depend on. The air I breathe is merged with my neighbour’s long before it reaches my closest friends; why do I act as though we are not that closely connected?
If we are going to change the world, it isn’t going to be done by individuals taking small actions, though that is a good place to start. It’s not going to be fixed by governments and radical laws, though that will be a necessary piece in the puzzle. We need to change the fundamentals of how we relate to each other, and how we see the world. We need to make community a thing that just happens, rather than something forced and awkward. We need to change our mindsets from What is best for me and mine? to What can I do for all of us? People like me, who might obsess for a week over exactly the right thing to casually say if you see the neighbours in the morning (and therefore end up saying nothing at all) need to take a deep breathe, get out of our introverted comfort zones, and say yes a lot more. We all need to get more specific, and make helping each other routine, instead of being remarkable, patronising, or an act of charity. The best harmonies are those where all the voices have their own lines, weaving and intertwining to create something more beautiful than any individual note. We need to stop practicing our own lines in front of the mirror, getting them to performance standard before we let anyone else know we’ve even been learning to sing. We need to work together with all our stumbles and missed notes, letting the shared melodies carry us through and make us stronger.
Of course, saying this is one thing. Doing it is quite another. For me, I think it might be time to step out of my comfort zone and offer my neighbour’s daughter a lift to school. Taking one step at a time, who knows where I might end up?
Messy Simplicity 